Four years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, many businesses near the U.S. Capitol were closed. Those who could work from home were sheltering inside. And lawmakers in Congress were busy certifying the presidential election.
Aside from those similarities, Jan. 6, 2025, couldn’t have been more different.
Exactly four years after one of the darkest days in American democracy, the certification of the electoral votes went about as smoothly as possible on Monday — or as smoothly as any congressional session could go after a rare snowstorm battered the region.
A certification that took more than 12 hours four years ago — between the debate, the riot, the evacuation, the clearing of the Capitol and the cleaning of it — only took about 50 minutes on Monday. There were hardly any remarkable moments.
Sen. JD Vance, the vice president-elect, remained seated almost the entire time. He offered polite applause for every state’s votes, even the ones that went for Kamala Harris, but he went the extra mile for his home state of Ohio, which earned a personal standing ovation.
Vance also gave the final vote tally a standing round of applause, waving to the fellow Republican lawmakers cheering him on.
Other than a few of those moments — and some lawmakers, like GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Donald Trump over his conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, sitting next to Vance — there was hardly anything notable about Monday’s session. Which may be the most notable part.
Life on Capitol Hill has largely returned to, if not normal, then a new normal.
Gone are the metal detectors that Democrats installed outside the House chamber in the days following the Capitol riot. The blood that could be found in the hallways on Jan. 6 has all been cleaned up. The glass that rioters shattered inside and outside of the Capitol was replaced.
Of the 147 Republicans who came back from the deadly attack on the Capitol and voted to overturn the election, 110 are still members. Rep. Elise Stefanik — one of the first members to speak on the floor after the attack, urging members to overturn election results — is now on track to be confirmed as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. The lead architect of the legal effort within Congress to keep Trump in office, Rep. Mike Johnson, is now the speaker of the House.
The old GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy, who said Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack on the Capitol the night of the insurrection, was quick to backtrack his criticism. His Jan. 6 comments didn’t help save him when Republicans removed him for being insufficiently conservative.
The No. 3 House Republican at the time, Liz Cheney, has practically been excommunicated from the party over her criticism of Jan. 6. First she was removed from House GOP leadership. Then she was primaried and removed from office, just like so many of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.
Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, only two — Reps. Dan Newhouse and David Valadao — remain in office.
Four years ago, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said his vote to certify the election against Trump’s wishes was “the most important vote I’ve ever cast.”
On Monday, McConnell wasn’t even present in the chamber.
Unlike in 2016, no members of the opposite party objected to the certification.
“I have no respect for Donald Trump, but I do have respect for the democratic process,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the Jan. 6 committee.
Only a handful of scattered protesters stood outside the Capitol in the snow, urging Democrats against certifying the election results.
The activist Anushka Drescher flew in from California last week to help coordinate an effort to disqualify Trump under the 14th Amendment.
Drescher said she spent Friday making the rounds on Capitol Hill, urging aides to tell their bosses to object to the election results. She told NOTUS she heard, over and over again, that her plan was “not realistic.”
The Jan. 6 attack was once a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign. By November, the attack was rarely mentioned.
In his final speech before the 2022 midterm elections, Biden called the Capitol a “citadel of democracy” and spoke of the “enraged mob that had been whipped up into a frenzy by a president repeating over and over again the “big lie” that the election of 2020 had been stolen.”
“We’ll have our difference of opinion, and that’s how it’s supposed to be,” Biden said. “But there is something else at stake: democracy itself.”
House Democrats exceeded almost every pundit’s and pollster’s expectations that year, losing the House to Republicans by only a few seats.
But when Harris took over as the Democratic presidential candidate, she focused more heavily on economic issues and reproductive rights rather than democracy and Jan. 6.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the Jan. 6 committee, told NOTUS on Monday that Harris’ approach was a mistake.
“I wasn’t involved with the campaign. I didn’t hire a pollster or consultant. But I’ve been elected for over 50 years, and I know in my conversations with people all over the country, people felt very threatened by the likelihood of another Trump administration,” Thompson said.
“Now, whatever consultant said, ‘That’s not an issue,’ in my humble opinion, they made a mistake,” he said.
Just before the certification this year, Thompson joined over a dozen of his colleagues on the third floor of the House gallery. Four years ago, the group was trapped together, wearing so-called “escape hoods” as they fled the chamber.
The group met again this year to take a picture. Rep. Pramila Jayapal was part of the group. Four years ago, she’d recently had a knee replacement, and as Thompson remembered, she struggled to move to safety.
“I don’t think people have moved on. I think the Republicans have been trying to rewrite what happened,” Jayapal told NOTUS on Monday.
“I know for many Americans, and certainly my constituents who saw me trapped in the gallery that day, it is very alive and well. And I think people are in shock about the fact that we’re actually coming back in today to certify the election for the guy who incited an insurrection,” she said.
“That’s one of the very hard things about today,” she said. “It’s not just the loss; it’s who won and what he did to democracy in this country.”
Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan said that, in some ways, it’s “a healing thing” that most of the American public has moved on from Jan. 6, even if some members of Congress have not.
“But I also think we’re always in danger of reexperiencing history if we don’t understand and appreciate it,” she said.
“The events of Jan. 6 are still very, very recent, and to be something that has sort of receded in the mind of people is really kind of concerning,” she added.
Republicans diverged in their approach to the day. Some, like Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, focused on remembering law enforcement. Others took a different approach.
“On #ThisDayInHistory in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building,” Rep. Mike Collins posted on X.
While other Republicans weren’t as inaccurate and trollish, most did try to minimize it.
“Look, it’s history, I mean, but a sad four hours of our history,” Rep. Dan Meuser said. “But it was a bad day. I’m not making any excuses for it. The Democrats did everything they could to fan that flame forever and ever and ever. Meanwhile, it lasted four hours.”
Rep. Derrick Van Orden — who was photographed on the Capitol premises on Jan. 6 and used campaign funds to attend the riot — said Republicans have “allowed the left to run wild with a false narrative for four years.” He said it’s a “crock of shit” that insurrectionists are still in prison.
“Enough of this buffoonery,” he said.
Still, other Republicans were less enthusiastic about leaving Jan. 6 in the past — albeit because they think there was some conspiracy.
“We still don’t know what happened,” Rep. Aaron Bean told NOTUS. “Hopefully, that’s one thing Donald Trump will do, and Kash Patel will do, let’s be transparent on what role the FBI played and how it unfolded.”
—
Katherine Swartz, Mark Alfred, Samuel Larreal and Helen Huiskes are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.
Matt Fuller, who is Capitol Hill bureau chief at NOTUS, contributed to this report.